11 · Web viewAlthough nuclear power programmes are being enthusiastically pursued by a few...

CHAPTER 11: ONE OF MANY PAGE 167

11. ONE OF MANY

The second morning after after Gemma’s death, Steven, Richenda and I drove to one of the beaches near Sellafield. We walked to the stony end of the bay where there were no people and sat down. Without warning, Richenda suddenly stood up and started throwing stones into the sea. “Why Gemma? Why did she have to die?” she shouted with all the unrestrained anger of a ten-year-old. Steven started silently throwing stones too, while I just sat and stared out to sea. I was channelling my aggression in another direction. Gemma had loved this beach and we had come there to play often. But I did not really know why we were there 30 hours after she had died. I hated the place. I loathed it. I knew that the whole shoreline had been polluted by Sellafield: radiation in the sand, poison in the salt spray, plutonium in the sea. I could almost taste the contamination on my tongue. I was sure that it had something to do with Gemma’s leukaemia. I was certain it had contributed to her death. It was then I make the decision that has determined the rest of my life. There was no way I would ever give up fighting for Gemma.

The period immediately after the formal mourning was the worst. Deprived of ceremony, of the constant coming and going of people, of the concern of many, we just had to carry on. Richenda went back to school. Despite all that had happened, Steven went back to work for a contractor at Sellafield. That may seem like a crazy thing to have done, but it was the only place where he could realistically get a job, and we desperately needed the money. In any case the moral dilemma did not last long because he only worked at Sellafield for another six months, before he was transferred somewhere else and then made redundant.

I was left on my own in the house, which seemed so quiet without Gemma. I missed her with a pain that was physical. Friends and relatives


gave me tremendous support but I decided I had to get a job to prevent me getting seriously depressed. The first factory I went to offered me work the moment they realised that I was Gemma’s mother, which upset me because I wanted to be chosen on my merit not because I used to have a famous daughter. I started doing a few shifts instead at my aunty’s packaging factory nearby, but I never really settled down to anything. For the first 12 months after Gemma’s death, I must have worked in at least eight different places.

The one purpose that did inspire me, that kept me going, was the legal action against British Nuclear Fuels. I was in regular touch with Martyn Day and whenever I got the opportunity to talk about Gemma on the television or in the newspapers, I took it. Because of the publicity that the legal action continued to attract, there were frequent opportunities. Some people suggested to me that now Gemma was dead, I should stop fighting, but I took the opposite view. All I had left were photographs, video tapes, a scrapbook and my memories, but I was more than ever determined that she should not have died in vain. I wanted to make sure that she would never be forgotten. I wanted to talk about her, about what she was like, about how she suffered and about why I blamed Sellafield. I wanted the world to think twice about nuclear power. Which was more important: power, profit and jobs or the lives of innocent children?

So when Martyn told me that Granada Television were interested in making a hard-hitting drama-documentary recreating the story behind the court cases with actors, I got involved. I let my rooms and windows be measured so that our house could be recreated on a film set in Manchester. I talked to the producers, Ian McBride and Sita Williams, for hours about Gemma, what she was like and everything that had happened to her. I lent them lots of personal photographs and video tapes. I suggested that Tina’s daughter, Bianca, be cast in the part of Gemma (which after two auditions


she nearly was). I went along to the first audition, took offence at the off-hand attitude of one of Granada’s senior staff and was stupidly rude to some of the parents when they started worrying about their children’s hair being cut off to resemble Gemma. I angrily insisted that Steven’s father be left out of the documentary as I did not want to risk offending him again. I tried to tell the actress who was going to play me (Lorraine Ashbourne) what I was like, as did Steven the actor who was going to play him (Gary Mavers). I once went to watch them filming on the beach, but the effect of seeing Jennifer Kate Wilson, the little girl from Workington who was eventually chosen to play Gemma, limping towards the car wearing an over-sized jacket and a baseball cap just like Gemma did, was too much to handle. I never watched them filming again.

As Martyn Day and his team delved deeper into the background to the legal action, they decided that Gemma was no longer going to be one of the frontline test cases. Their reasoning was that the most likely way to win the case was to hinge it on Professor Gardner’s new evidence linking the exposure of fathers to high radiation doses at Sellafield with the incidence of leukaemia amongst their children. The connection was particularly strong where fathers had received more than 100 millisieverts (a measure of radiation dose) prior to conception. The problem with our case, apparently, was that there was no firm evidence that Steven had ever been exposed to such high levels of radiation. According to BNFL’s records, he only received a dose of 9.11 millisieverts between 1977 and 1983, the period before Gemma was conceived. The fathers of the two chosen test cases - George Reay, whose daughter Dorothy died of leukaemia when she was ten months old, and David Hope, whose daughter Vivien was left permanently disabled after recovering from a disease closely related to leukaemia - both had much higher recorded radiation doses (384 and 184 millisieverts respectively).


Although I was disappointed by the decision, I accepted it. Steven had sometimes been employed in areas which BNFL classed as “non active” and had hence not always been issued with a radiation badge. Even when he did wear a badge, he had doubts about its reliability. It was therefore impossible to say what levels he had actually been exposed to. I could not rule out another possibility: that it was not just Steven’s irradiation that had caused Gemma’s death, it was the radioactive contamination of the environment outside Sellafield. I kept thinking about all those days we played on the beach and how easy it would have been to have inadvertently picked up something that sparked off the malfunction in Gemma’s bone marrow.

In their investigations Martyn and his team managed to unearth some damning evidence about BNFL’s past practices at Sellafield. They discovered, for example, that the radiation badges worn in the 1950s and early 1960s were systematically underestimating the levels of radiation to which workers were actually exposed by as much as 50 per cent. The information was revealed in a four-page paper found within one of the huge piles of documents which BNFL were forced to release by the court. Written in August 1960 by Sellafield’s head of health and safety, Huw Howells, it recommended that a note should be added to workers’ dose records explaining that they were significant underestimates. His recommendation, however, was ignored and no such note ever appeared. That meant that all the dose records that formed the basis of Professor Gardner’s report were too low. It also meant that the dose levels recorded for George Reay and David Hope were too low. By the time their cases came to court, this was a point that BNFL had conceded. George Reay’s real lifetime dose, the company admitted, was more than one and a half times higher that that recorded on his official records (639 instead of 384 millisieverts). He died of cancer in the mid 1980s, for which his wife, Dorothy, blamed Sellafield.


What Martyn’s team discovered about radiation releases into the environment from Sellafield was, to my mind, even more shocking. First of all there was the admission that releases of uranium oxide from corroding fuel cartridges in the 1950s were 200 times higher than originally admitted. Then there was BNFL’s acceptance that the total amount of plutonium discharged into the atmosphere over the years had been much greater that previously suggested. In 1984, BNFL said that atmospheric plutonium releases had been 67 gigabecquerels (a large unit of radioactivity). Two years later the company revised this upwards to 174. But a paper submitted to the court by Professor Steve Jones, BNFL’s head of environmental protection, finally put the figure of total plutonium releases prior to 1984 at a staggering 3,400 gigabecquerels. In other words BNFL’s original estimate of atmospheric plutonium emissions had been more than 50 times too low. This was all, of course, in addition to the three quarters of a tonne of plutonium that had been dumped down Sellafield’s pipeline into the Irish Sea - which was now gradually coming back ashore.

Despite the alarming extent of Sellafield’s environmental pollution, Martyn and his team maintained their focus on Professor Gardner’s evidence because they believed it was stronger. They abandoned plans to call any environmental expert witnesses of their own, simply choosing to attack BNFL’s experts instead. This strategy, which I am sure seemed the right one at the time, meant that the whole case effectively hung on the credibility of Gardner’s hypothesis, which became known as Paternal Preconception Irradiation. BNFL devoted a great deal of effort to attempting to undermine Professor Gardner’s work, which it said had been “deliberately blurred” in a way which favoured his hypothesis. The company was supported by one of Britain’s most eminent epidemiologists, Sir Richard Doll, who suggested that Gardner’s study was biased and incorrect. Unfortunately, Professor Gardner, whose reputation had always been


faultless, was in no position to defend himself. He died of lung cancer in January 1993.

After 90 days in the High Court in London and legal costs totalling at least £8 million, the judge Mr Justice French delivered his verdict on Friday 8 October 1993. I went down south specially, and accompanied by my younger sister, Nina, and my mother, fought through the journalists and photographers on the street outside to get into the court room. Inside it felt cold and looked very strange, with all the benches and tables made of ancient, polished wood. But it was packed, and the atmosphere was tense and expectant. It took two hours of talking before Mr Justice French got to the point. He said he had decided on the balance of probabilities that it had not been proved that the irradiation of fathers had been a material cause of their children’s leukaemia. Martyn Day, Elizabeth Reay and Vivien Hope had, in other words, lost. Mrs Reay, a frail, elderly woman of 73, did not get the £150,000 compensation that she had claimed for the loss of her ten-month-old baby girl and Ms Hope, who was 28, did not get the £125,000 she had claimed for her disability. They were both understandably disappointed, and, I think, rather shaken by the vulture-like attention of the media. Drinking coffee afterwards in Martyn’s office, everyone was very depressed. But I refused to be downcast.

It seemed to me that simply by having the courage to mount the case in the first place, we had won. We had received an enormous amount of publicity enabling us to tell the world the scandal of what had been happening around Sellafield. We had shown that, despite BNFL’s best endeavours, there were some people in the local community who were not prepared to remain silent; who could not stand by while their husbands were irradiated at work, their environment irrevocably poisoned and their children killed. We were just ordinary people and we had sent shock waves through the nuclear establishment around the world, frightened the nuclear industry


in Britain and shown up British Nuclear Fuels (annual turnover £1.1 billion) as petty and mean-minded. I was particularly disgusted by what BNFL’s lawyers did immediately after Mr Justice French had finished delivering his verdict. They leapt to their feet to ask the judge to introduce what is known as a “pools clause” in the agreement over legal costs. This meant that if ever Elizabeth Reay or Vivien Hope, whose costs were all met by legal aid, received a financial windfall such as winning the football pools, it would have to be handed over to BNFL as a contribution to the company’s legal costs. The request was granted.

BNFL argued on television that the £8 million spent in fighting and defending the case would have been better invested on trying to find a cure for leukaemia. This made me angry too, as it seemed to me that prevention is always better than cure. The court case was aimed at trying to determine the cause of the excess of childhood leukaemias around Sellafield. If it had succeeded, it would have been more valuable than any further research into cures, because action could have been taken to eliminate the cause. Our hopes of being able to return to court in the short term were dashed when the same judge, Mr Justice French, turned down an application by Martyn Day to postpone any hearing on Gemma and seven other cases for which legal aid had been granted for a year to allow further research to be completed. The judge agreed to BNFL’s suggestion that the cases should be discontinued but made it clear that a fresh action could be brought if new evidence linking Sellafield to childhood leukaemia emerged. In the meantime we lost our entitlement to legal aid.

In the next issue of the company newspaper, BNFL News, the front-page banner headline was “CLEARED”. BNFL’s company secretary and legal director, Alvin Shuttleworth, was quoted as saying: “With such a decisive judgement, the Legal Aid Board as well as the courts would appear to have concluded that BNFL’s operations are not the cause of leukaemia in children


in West Cumbria.” BNFL’s next annual report also claimed that the court had “cleared BNFL of the allegations that radiation from Sellafield had caused leukaemia in children.” The kindest thing to say about such claims is that they are misleading. There was no way that the court had “cleared” BNFL of all responsibility for the leukaemias. It had simply decided, on the balance of probabilities and in the absence of supporting evidence, that Gardner’s theory of Paternal Preconception Irradiation could not currently be blamed. It had agreed that the cluster of leukaemias near Sellafield could not be explained by chance, but it had concluded nothing - and was not asked to conclude anything - about whether or not environmental radiation from Sellafield could have been responsible. The argument is still wide open.

Since the court case finished, the scientific argument about the cause of the leukaemia cluster has rumbled on. Just ten days later, the Government’s Health and Safety Executive published a detailed study which in some ways supported Gardner’s theory. The study found a “strong statistical association” between the childhood leukaemias in Seascale and the radiation doses received by their fathers at Sellafield, but it found no evidence of such an effect in the rest of West Cumbria. It did not rule out radiation exposure as a cause or the theory that the large influx of Sellafield workers into the area in the 1950s and 60s could have introduced a cancer-causing virus (a theory known as ‘population mixing’). The study’s director, deputy chief inspector of nuclear installations Eddie Varney, said: “We cannot find any single cause that satisfactorily explains what we see. It is difficult to deny a role for population mixing, but we find it hard to rule out radiation in the case of Seascale. But radiation alone cannot explain Seascale.”

A bewildering series of further studies, all of which have come to similarly tentative conclusions, have since been published. A study by the Cancer Research Campaign’s epidemiology unit at Oxford University in March 1993


found an apparent link between fathers exposed to radiation at two nuclear weapons plants in Berkshire - Aldermaston and Burghfield - and the high rate of childhood leukaemias in the local area. Another study by Birmingham University published at the same time showed an almost threefold increased in the rate of cancer amongst the children of people who worked with nuclear materials. In both cases the authors thought that their results tended to support the Gardner hypothesis. On the other hand Dr Leo Kinlen, also from the Oxford University unit, has authored a number of high-profile papers which he said lent support to the population mixing and viral theories and cast doubt on Gardner’s work. Other studies - like one in September 1992 by the Government’s Committee on the Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment and another in November 1993 by Oxford University, Leeds University and the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle - just sat on the fence. They confirmed that there was a significant excess of childhood leukaemia near Sellafield that was unlikely to have been caused by chance, but were unable to offer any clear explanation as to why.

Other studies gave other insights. An exhaustive examination of 95,000 people employed by the British nuclear industry since 1945 - published in 1992 - found a statistically significant association between the incidence of leukaemia and prolonged exposures to low levels of radiation. The Government’s National Radiological Protection Board suggested that the risk of low level radiation causing leukaemia may be twice as high as previously thought. A study published by doctors at Lancaster Moor Hospital and a Cumbrian General Practitioner in the British Medical Journal in November 1990 argued that the grandchildren of Sellafield workers had a high risk of developing a rare eye cancer that can lead to blindness. They reported three cases of retinoblastoma amongst the grandchildren of Sellafield workers where less than one would normally be expected. Three years later one of them, Dr James Morris from Lancaster Moor Hospital, wrote to the


British Medical Journal pointing out that two more cases had been brought to his attention since the original report had been published, making the rate of eye tumours amongst the children of mothers living near Sellafield twenty times that expected.

There is more research under way and of course more is necessary. But I doubt - at least in the short term - whether a causal link between Sellafield and the local excess of childhood leukaemias will become scientifically uncontroversial. It is safe to predict that there will be dozens more learned papers, some of which will tend to blame Sellafield and some of which will not. One aspect of future research, though does concern me. In September 1994, a plush new £3 million scientific centre was opened near Whitehaven in Cumbrian called the Westlakes Research Institute. Most of its research will be into the environmental and health effects of Sellafield, including possible causes of the raised incidence of childhood leukaemia. It already holds data on the radiation dose records and cancer rates of BNFL workers, past and present. According to its brochure, its mission is to be recognised “as a scientific establishment of national and international repute.”

The problem is that Westlakes is almost entirely funded by British Nuclear Fuels. Virtually all the money for building and equipping the institute came from BNFL, and in 1994 the company sponsored 90 per cent of its research contracts. Most of the institute’s senior research staff used to work for BNFL, including its director Roger Berry (BNFL’s former health and safety director), its chairman Gregg Butler (former manager of BNFL’s Springfields site near Preston), its business director Tim Knowles (BNFL’s former head of corporate affairs), and its director of environmental research Steve Jones (BNFL’s former head of environmental protection). It is regarded by some outside scientists as “BNFL’s in-house lab”. It may be that all these good people backed by BNFL money will one day discover the precise mechanism that connects Sellafield to childhood leukaemias. But I am not holding my breath.


Since Gemma was first diagnosed as having leukaemia in July 1987, I have spent a great deal of time reading, talking and thinking about radiation and Sellafield. I have learnt much, and doubtless have much more to learn. But I have come to some clear, and I hope informed, conclusions. There can be no doubt that radiation causes cancer, even at very low levels. Prolonged exposure to small amounts of radioactivity increases the risk of cancer, particularly cancer of the blood, leukaemia. This does not mean that everyone who receives such exposure will become ill. But it does mean that some people - perhaps only a few - will contract a disease that they otherwise would not have done. Broadly speaking, BNFL and the Government’s nuclear regulatory authorities accept that this is the case. That is why they will admit that certain releases of radiation could “theoretically” increase the incidence of cancer in affected populations. The National Radiological Protection Board, for example, said in 1992 that planned emissions of radioactive krypton gas from Sellafield could cause two or three fatal cancers every year. As Steven once pointed out, if he had set up a business which killed two or three people every year, he would be in prison for murder.

The argument is over precisely what levels of radiation can be blamed for specific conditions in specific individuals. If one person is given a large dose of radiation and then goes on to develop cancer, it is relatively easy to prove cause and effect. But if thousands of people are given small extra doses and then four or five of them contract leukaemia, it is very difficult to prove a causal link. This is especially true, as in our case, where there is no way of really knowing exactly what levels of radiation people were exposed to in the past. I doubt whether we shall ever be sure of Steven’s true exposure at Sellafield, and there is certainly no method of measuring in retrospect what all of us picked up on Cumbria’s beaches. I understand the scepticism of some scientists when confronted with a statistical association


between Sellafield and childhood leukaemia that does not conform to conventional understanding of how low doses of radiation affect people. But do we have to accept conventional understanding - which is after all only based on studies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims - as gospel?

I accept that it is always going to be hard to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that Gemma’s leukaemia was caused by Sellafield. But several things are clear to me. The science of radiation is relatively new, and there is much we still do not understand. The more we discover, the greater the risks turn out to be. It would not be surprising, therefore, if in a few years time scientists uncovered a hitherto unknown health effect due to a particular type of radioactivity at very low levels previously considered safe. There are already some investigators who are suggesting possible new ways in which alpha radiation - the type that is emitted by plutonium - could damage our living cells. In these circumstances, it seems to me that the sensible way to behave is to assume that it is all dangerous. That means constantly questioning accepted notions of radiation safety and being prepared to abandon conventional scientific wisdom when there is good reason to doubt it.

No-one really knows the cause of leukaemia, particularly chronic myeloid leukaemia. According to the Leukaemia Research Fund:

Persons exposed to excessive doses of radiation, such as survivors of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and patients who have received radiotherapy for a variety of medical conditions, have a slightly greater chance than other people of developing Chronic Myeloid Leukaemia some years later, but for most patients radiation probably plays no part in causing the leukaemia. The possible involvement of other environmental agents such as drugs, chemicals or viruses has still not been determined.


Scientists know that patients with chronic myeloid leukaemia always have a mutant bone marrow gene, but they have no idea what causes it to mutate. It could be a combination of several different factors. A virus introduced by the arrival of a large number of people from a different area could make some people’s bone marrow cells more susceptible to radiation damage. Chemicals such as benzine, which is contained in petrol, or others associated with microelectronics could help trigger or progress the change, as could some drugs. In such a state of ignorance, I think we all have to use our common sense. We know that radiation causes leukaemia. We know that more children than usual around Sellafield suffer leukaemia. We know that the environment around the plant has been contaminated with radioactivity. As far as I am concerned, this leads to one inescapable conclusion. Either directly or indirectly, on its own or in association with other agents, via paternal exposure, environmental pollution or both, radiation from Sellafield is responsible for children contracting leukaemia. Only an fool - and an arrogant fool at that - could carry on pretending there is nothing to worry about.

Unfortunately that is precisely the attitude that has been adopted by British Nuclear Fuels. I have never ceased to be amazed at the company’s unshakable faith in its innocence, almost as if only its scientists were incapable of error. BNFL always claimed that it was not the money that prevented the payment of compensation to leukaemia victims, it was principle. If so, it is a cruel principle. Given the weight of the evidence, given the common-sense conclusion that most people would draw, a compassionate company would have accepted moral responsibility. A company that cared about its public image would have agreed to settle the leukaemia cases before they came to court. That would have cost tax-payers considerably less than the £8 million they ended up spending and - in the pattern of the compensation scheme already agreed for irradiated


workers - it could have been done without any admission of legal liability. By doing the decent thing, BNFL would have come out smelling of roses. Instead, there is a more pungent reek.

A similarly sour smell hung around the company’s tacit support for attempts by leading Cumbrians to ban the filming and broadcast of Granada Television’s drama-documentary about Gemma. The trouble started when Granada advertised in the local press for young girls who wanted to play the part of Gemma. Then in June 1983 when the film crew appeared on St Bees beach and erected some signs warning about the dangers of radiation simulating those erected by Greenpeace in 1983, all hell broke lose. An irate Conservative councillor, Norman Clarkson, tried to mobilise a convey of vehicles to blockade the crew in their car park until they surrendered their film, but got there too late. He claimed that if the film was allowed to be screened it would do “untold damage” to the economy of the local area. A spokesman for BNFL agreed the programme should not be made, commenting that “the tragic story of Gemma D’Arcy is not a suitable subject for entertainment.” The company wrote to Granada making the same point.

Two months later, local council leader Bill Minto chaired a special meeting in St Bees involving politicians from across the spectrum, business leaders, tourism officials and other local worthies. They demanded a chance to preview the documentary and angrily threatened to report Granada to the Independent Television Commission (ITC) if it was unfair. They were backed by the local newspaper, The Whitehaven News, which complained that people who live and work in West Cumbria would be seen as “some kind of mentally sub-normal beings.” The former deputy Conservative Prime Minister, Lord Willie Whitelaw, went so far as to write to Granada, the Broadcasting Complaints Commission and the ITC saying that “he could not accept the idea of any film of this sort being broadcast at this time.” His complaint, like all those that were made about the programme, was


rejected. When BNFL’s chief executive, Neville Chamberlain, complained after the programme was broadcast about its “highly-charged” nature, Granada’s chief executive delivered a robust response:

I do not expect you to acknowledge the merits of ‘Fighting for Gemma’ but I would ask you to accept that it was produced in good faith and in line with our normal high standards of programme making. To characterise it as ‘the suffering of an innocent child making good television’ is to impute a purely cynical motivation to us which is unfair.

The title of programme, which was always scheduled to be broadcast after the court case had finished, was changed from ‘Justice for Gemma’ to ‘Fighting for Gemma’ in the light of the verdict. Lasting two hours, it was screened at eight o’clock in the evening of Wednesday 10th November 1993 and watched by around eight million people. I saw two previews, one arranged locally by the producers and one arranged by Martyn Day in the Little Gem theatre in London just before the actual television broadcast. As soon as I saw the opening sequence of Gemma riding her bike and Steven taking photographs on the beach accompanied by the song “My Girl”, I started to cry. But my tears were not of self-pity, rather of sympathy for the poor family on screen. I was irritated by some of liberties that the script took with the timing of events, and sometimes impatient with the laboured way in which Martyn and his team explained what seemed obvious, but these were minor complaints. Basically I thought the programme was very fair, very good and very powerful. It conveyed the essence of what we had had the misfortune to endure. I revelled in the fame it would attract to Gemma’s name. My daughter, as I had intended, was never going to become anonymous. Her brief life, her bitter experience, her avoidable death were never going to fade away.


Despite all my previous experience, I was not prepared for the onslaught that followed. Because Steven and I were in London at Martyn’s preview, it was my 16-year-old sister, Nina, who received the dozens of telephone calls at home, most of them from well-wishers. There were a few unpleasant anonymous calls suggesting that we had been used and that Gemma’s memory should be buried, which upset Nina. When we got back the next day, we were greeted by a large bouquet of flowers from Granada Television, thanking us for our help. Then the local rumour mill went into overdrive, with the extraordinary suggestion that we had made up to three-quarters of a million pounds from the programme. For the record, all we ever got out of Granada, apart from a few cups of coffee and some fish and chips, was a £500 consultation fee for taking time off work to help the producers.

Then came the deluge of letters. There were a few nasty ones, all anonymous and nearly all of which we threw away. I suspect most of them were from local people, either Sellafield employees or their close relations. However much I tried to rationalise them, they hurt. How am I supposed to react when people take the time to write to me to tell me that I should shut up, that I am threatening to put people out of work, that I am hurting the feelings of others who have lost someone close? How can I remain rational when someone suggests that because Gemma is dead, I should forget her? By accident, I did keep two of the less hysterical letters. “Only those with sick minds could watch a child suffer or let it be shown, “ said one. “Please, Mrs D’Arcy, let Gemma rest in peace, and only then will you have peace of mind.” The other, which was signed by “A Supporter of BNFL” took me to task for having the audacity to challenge the nuclear industry. “West Cumbria would be in a sad state without BNFL. So would your family, friends and neighbours. Have you given any thought to this?” it lectured. “Take a


bit of advice. Get on with your life. You only come this way once, enjoy it. Your husband had a good living out of BNFL. You’ll never win.”

Happily, the bad were far out-weighed by the good, none of which were anonymous. There were so many, I never got a chance to reply to them. They were often very personal, deeply sympathetic and hugely heartening. They were really important in helping me continue the struggle. I am for ever grateful to their authors, most of whom were ordinary mothers like myself. The following extracts are typical:

I don’t know if this letter will ever reach you, but I just had to write, as one mother to another. I watched the television programme tonight about your dear daughter Gemma. I am still crying now and I don’t think a programme has ever affected me so deeply...Gemma’s sense of humour and inner strength were fantastic, and she is an inspiration to many adults who treat life so lightly, and throw it away so easily.

I have just been watching ‘Fighting for Gemma’ and had to write and say how privileged I feel having ‘met’ Gemma through the programme. I lost my mother 18 months ago and my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter was conceived while my husband had cancer. He also works at Sellafield. I live my life in fear living where we do.

I have just gone through anger, hope, desperation, frustration and devastation in two hours. Dear God, what on earth did you go through? And what do you still go through every day?...I feel that in all these circumstances where giant companies have power and wealth, they can walk all over normal, everyday people. But eventually if enough people join together and are strong, they can at least start to rock the boat.

You must carry on the fight for Gemma. The truth must out. She must not have died in vain. I admire your guts and determination to fight on. How proud she would be you! Please don’t give up. One day Gemma D’Arcy’s name will trip off the tongue as the case that took on and beat the Big Guns!


I want to let you know that I know that Gemma existed because tonight she has touched part of my life...I was born in Whitehaven...My three eldest children played on the beaches at Drigg and Seascale. I can remember having to jump over the discharges on the sand from Sellafield. It was crazy...I hope that your bravery in allowing this programme to be shown will make the British public think more carefully about Sellafield and nuclear power stations.

Sellafield, meantime, has carried on leaking. A leak of liquid plutonium on the 8th September 1992 led to a reprocessing plant being shut down for seven weeks. Plutonium nitrate spilled into a hot steel-lined concrete cell and formed “crusty lumps” on the inside. Scientists were worried that enough plutonium might congregate to set off an accidental nuclear chain reaction which would have caused a burst of radiation. The plant had to be closed down so that the contamination could be cleaned up. After investigating the incident, the Government’s Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII) said that the leak had only been spotted by good luck. Instruments which should have alerted plant operators failed to do so, and the problem was only noticed “visually”. The NII was concerned that “there weren’t any lines of defence left.” BNFL originally told the NII that just 700 grams had leaked, but later upgraded this to “several kilograms”. The incident was initially described as level one in the International Nuclear Event Scale, defined as an “anomaly”. But when the full picture emerged, it was redefined as level three - “a serious incident”.

On 10th February 1993, about one gigabecquerel (a very large unit of radioactivity) of radioactive dust was released into the atmosphere from a disused plutonium purification plant, showering local areas. Although the Government insisted that the release was safe, it provoked an uncharacteristicly angry outburst from one of Sellafield’s best friends, the local Labour MP, Dr Jack Cunningham. He had been on an official visit to the


site while the leak was taking place, but had not been told about it by BNFL - an oversight described by the Government Environment Minister, David Maclean, as “a rather extraordinary discourtesy.” Dr Cunningham told the House of Commons the following week that there had been a “totally unacceptable series of events” at the site. Two weeks later BNFL confessed that there had in fact been a second leak - three gigabecquerels of radioactive iodine from a reprocessing plant - around the same time.

Just two days later - on 27th February 1993 - BNFL pleaded guilty in court to four charges of violating safety regulations at Sellafield - its third such conviction. Magistrates in Whitehaven fined the company £6,000 and awarded the NII, which brought the prosecution, nearly £11,000 in costs. The problem arose in April 1992 from the deliberate overriding of a safety lock designed to prevent the inadvertent opening of a heavy radiation-proof door shielding a high-level nuclear waste store. Although the error was spotted and corrected before anyone was exposed to excessive radiation, the NII launched a prosecution because the incident was similar to another that had taken place the previous year. On that occasion the NII had warned BNFL to make sure that it did not happen again. BNFL was previously convicted of moving irradiated nuclear fuel around the site without radiation detection equipment and for contaminating the beaches in 1983 (which I described in Chapter 1).

With such a poor record on top of the controversy over the child leukaemia cases, observers might have expected BNFL to do all that it could in the future to reduce its radioactive discharges. In fact they are set to increase dramatically. In December 1993, after 20 years of controversy, the Government finally gave BNFL the go-ahead for a new £2.8 billion plant at Sellafield, known as the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant, or THORP. Over the next ten years THORP is designed to reprocess spent fuel from nuclear power stations in nine different countries: Britain, Japan, Germany,


Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands and Canada. According to BNFL, it will make a profit of £500 million over the same period. Like its predecessor reprocessing plants, it will discharge liquid radioactive waste into the Irish Sea and gaseous radioactive waste into the atmosphere. According to BNFL’s THORP application to Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Pollution in 1992, the amount of plutonium put into the sea would triple over two years (from 1,080 to 2,997 gigabecquerels), as will levels of caesium 137. Emissions of ruthenium 106 and carbon 14 are set to rise eight times, while strontium 90 will leap ten times. Aerial emissions of radioactive materials like krypton 85 are scheduled for similar increases.

A report by the Government’s National Radiological Protection Board, revealed by The Observer in October 1993, estimated that radiation doses delivered by Sellafield to the world’s population would almost quadruple after THORP started up. The report calculated that this could lead to several thousand cancer deaths over the next 10,000 years because of the persistence of two very long-lived radioactive substances that would be released - krypton 85 and iodine 129 - which “circulate globally and therefore irradiate large numbers of people.” This official estimate was much higher that that previously calculated by scientists commissioned by the environmental group Greenpeace, who reckoned ten years of releases from THORP would eventually cause 600 fatal cancers. At the same time a Government advisory body, the Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment, warned that the proposed increase in radioactive emissions from Sellafield “should be viewed with some concern.” Another Government adviser, the Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee, cautioned that THORP could lead to Sellafield becoming the world’s nuclear waste dump, with hundreds of tonnes of plutonium-contaminated waste from abroad being buried there.


Because of public concern over THORP, which was originally given the go-ahead after a long public inquiry in 1977, the Government held two public consultation exercises, one in 1992 and the other in 1993, after the plant had been built. There were objections from ten nations, including Scandinavia and Ireland, 104 local authorities and nearly 90,000 individuals. Even America made clear its view that separating plutonium increased the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation. Despite this, all the Government did when it allowed THORP to proceed, was to place specific limits on uranium emissions and ask BNFL to produce annual reports on its discharges. It refused to hold another public inquiry. Greenpeace immediately took the Government to court for allegedly breaching European law, but lost. As a result, Cumbria, Britain and the world are lumbered with a plant whose radioactive discharges are likely to kill thousands with cancer. The “deliberate scientific experiment” started by Sellafield in the 1950s is continuing.

Some people might argue that this would be acceptable if THORP was fulfilling a useful function. But as I argued in chapter 4, reprocessing is a totally redundant technology, making nuclear waste more difficult to dispose of and producing an extremely toxic product - plutonium - that no-one wants. Over the next ten years THORP is expected to process 2,670 tonnes of spent fuel from Japan, 2160 tonnes from Britain, 970 tonnes from Germany, 420 tonnes from Switzerland, 50 tonnes from Holland and a total of 140 tonnes from Italy, Spain and Sweden. This will produce about 55 tonnes of plutonium to add to the 40 tonnes of civil material that are already stockpiled at Sellafield, the ultimate destination of most of which is unknown. About 27 tonnes - perhaps 15 shiploads - are expected to be taken back to Japan by sea for use in its fast breeder reactors, if they work.

But plutonium of course has another use - as a nuclear explosive. It is no longer a secret how nuclear weapons are designed and there are no great


technical problems involved in making them. The only thing preventing international terrorist groups from building their own nuclear bomb is the availability of plutonium. THORP could remove that barrier by making plutonium more easily available. It will also increase the risk of nuclear weapons spreading to more countries and encourage other nations to use their civil nuclear power programme to make nuclear weapons. This is precisely what the international community has been trying to prevent countries like Iraq and North Korea from doing. As a report compiled for the US Defence Department concluded in 1983, THORP will increase the danger of nuclear war.

I have never argued that Sellafield should be completely shut down. I just want it made 100 per cent safe - for the environment, for local children, for the world. It may be too late to do anything about the environmental crimes of the past which helped kill my Gemma, but there is much that can be done to prevent the same crimes being repeated in the future. I think giving the go-ahead to THORP risks sacrificing human lives and global security for a few Cumbrian jobs. What BNFL and the British Government should accept is that reprocessing is a dangerous white elephant, an ancillary nuclear technology which may have seemed potentially useful in the 1950s - especially for military purposes - but which is out of place in the 1990s. It is certainly not an industry that should be sold into private ownership. For the sake of future generations, reprocessing should be phased out at Sellafield as it has been in most other countries in the world. This would not necessarily have any affect on the generation of electricity in nuclear power stations, as their spent fuel could simply be stored instead of being reprocessed. It would not leave Sellafield with nothing to do, as Britain would still face major long-term problems in handling the waste accumulated after 40 years of nuclear power. But it might make the world a safer place to live in the next millenium.


I also think that we do have to question whether we want to rely for our electricity on the radioactivity released by the splitting of the atom. Although nuclear power programmes are being enthusiastically pursued by a few countries like France, in most developed nations like Britain and Germany they have ground to a halt. Nuclear electricity is not essential to meet our energy needs, which can be easily provided by a combination of energy conservation, cleaned-up fossil fuels and renewable sources like the sun, wind and waves. Like Sellafield, nuclear power stations such as Three Mile Island in America (1979) and Chernobyl in the Ukraine (1986) have had accidents which resulted in dangerous amounts of radioactivity being released into the environment. Although in normal operation nuclear reactors are not as dirty as reprocessing plants, they routinely create large amounts of radioactivity, including plutonium, in their cores. All of this has to be treated, stored or disposed of somehow - with or without reprocessing - causing an eternal risk of environmental contamination. The problem of radioactive pollution begins in every nuclear reactor. It will only finally be solved when they have all been shut down.

In 1993 Greenpeace invited me to attend an anti-nuclear demonstration in Holland, along with two other local mothers whose children had suffered and recovered from leukaemia, Lynn Marr and Janine Allis-Smith. I had never contemplated joining a protest before and had no idea what to expect. To be frank, I was a little apprehensive. We were taken to a packed meeting at Greenpeace headquarters in Amsterdam where a man was standing on a table explaining to everyone the plans for the following day. We had to get up at four in the morning, assemble at the Greenpeace offices and take a two-hour coach trip to a small power station called Dodewaard which was sending its spent fuel to Sellafield for reprocessing. Lynn, Janine and I were put up in a small bed and breakfast, but everyone else got what sleep they


could in sleeping bags on the office floor. We were told not to drink too much as there would not be any toilet facilities at the site.

Just before we arrived at the power station, our coaches pulled off the road to enable the protesters to change into skeleton suits. When we reached the station’s gates, they all quickly ran out and lay down all along the driveway, as if they had just died on the spot. It was an impressive and rather ghoulish sight, all the more admirable for the fact that temperatures were well below freezing. When the plant’s senior management arrived around eight o’clock, they were not pleased. The only way anyone could get into the plant was by stepping over scores of ‘dead’ bodies. Greenpeace demanded a meeting to put their concerns to managers, which was at first angrily turned down.

Initially I did not know what to think. I talked to one of the protesters, a Dutch doctor, who told me he was deeply worried about the health effects of the reprocessing of Dutch fuel at Sellafield. I admired his determination to act on his beliefs. I looked at the human skeletons laid out on the ice-cold ground and realised that that was what they were all doing. They were using their bodies to peacefully protest about the contribution that their country’s nuclear reactors were making to Sellafield’s environmental crime. They were acting to try and prevent pollution from a plant 400 miles away killing any more children like Gemma. I began to admire what they were doing. I decided that I could not just stand by and watch.

The plant manager, Mr Arnold, who had been growing increasingly irritable about the disruption being caused to normal operations, was nearby. I approached him, asking if I could have a word. He turned his back and started walking away. I pulled out a picture of Gemma behind her red line prison in the Royal Victory Infirmary and shouted at him: “Can I give you this photograph? It is a picture of a child suffering from leukaemia. It is a picture of my daughter. It is her that these people are fighting for.” He


turned to face me, reluctantly took the photograph and put it in his pocket without a word. He subsequently agreed to meet with Greenpeace and to hold a separate meeting with Lynn, Janine and I.

Confronting Mr Arnold across his desk, with two Dutch MPs listening in, was a bizarre experience. But I think we made our point, and he certainly seemed to listen. He did not agree with our contention that radiation from Sellafield had caused our children’s illnesses, but as a father and grandfather himself, he sympathised with our feelings. At one point he took Gemma’s photograph out of his pocket, stared at it and then looked up at me. “I gave you the picture so that you could relate to a person, not a statistic,” I told him. “It shows my little girl enduring terrible suffering. It shows her losing her happiness, losing her childhood, losing her life. She was my daughter and very precious to me, but she is only one of many victims of Sellafield.”

Of course the protest did not stop Holland sending spent fuel to Sellafield. But it did achieve something - publicity for the issue, problems for the power station and - perhaps - a few second thoughts amongst its workers and managers. It was strange to realise that the further you travel from Sellafield, the more concerned people seem to be. It was chastening to appreciate the truly international scope of BNFL’s business. It was immeasurably heartening to know that wherever I was likely to go in the world I would not be alone in my fight. I like to think that, in a small way, I reached the heart of Mr Arnold. All change has to begin with such small steps. Someone important from a foreign nuclear company listened to me, understood what I was saying and did not pour scorn on my views. That may not be much, but it is far more than British Nuclear Fuels has ever done.

11 · Web viewAlthough nuclear power programmes are being enthusiastically pursued by a few...

Documents

Transcript of 11 · Web viewAlthough nuclear power programmes are being enthusiastically pursued by a few...